Journal of World History, vol. 20, no. 4 (2009)

ARTICLES

This article presents resources for thinking straight about the global history enterprise that have not been widely recognized or discussed by practitioners. Several important philosophers are discussed briefly; fuller attention is given to two. Hilary Putnam presents a nuanced account of human reason and flourishing that goes beyond the fact–value dichotomy that often bedevils our work. Daniel Dennett does much to clarify the nature of the evolutionary processes—natural, social, and cultural—we discuss and the elements of cultural interaction and learning, sometimes called “memes.”

This article discusses the translation of ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian texts of philosophy and sciences into Arabic from the eighth through the tenth centuries C.E. In particular, it addresses the issue of how ancient sciences were justified and legitimized in the early ‘Abbāsid period (ca. 750–850). Modern scholars have so far devoted a great deal of attention to the role of the caliphate and its administrative elite in the translation movement, but they have by and large neglected the role of prevailing ideological and intellectual discourses as a major component of the legitimating process in ‘Abbāsid society. Less concerned with documenting practical needs or emphasizing the role of the caliphate to explain the history of the translation movement, this article explores how the narratives of prophetic and antediluvian wisdom as a discursive intervention shaped, within the broader context of scholarly consciousness, the reception history of ancient sciences. It argues that the reference to occult and prophetic knowledge, often attributed to Hermes, as the source of all knowledge, articulated, with the idioms of the developing discourse of ‘ilm, the desire to cast ancient sciences as part of an Islamic monotheistic narrative and the emerging historical consciousness that embraced the past as a theater of prophetic action.

Until the invention of the electric telegraph, messages sent across the vast colonial empires of the nineteenth century took many months to arrive. By 1907, some 200,000 nautical miles of cable criss-crossed the ocean floors. Insulation of the cables from seawater relied on gutta-percha, a natural plastic related to rubber. Gutta-percha is all but forgotten today, but during the Victorian era it was a household word. Ironically, the high-tech Victorian telegraph industry was served by a primitive cottage industry. The gum was extracted by killing wild trees in the forests of Southeast Asia, and the scale of demand ensured that many millions of trees were destroyed. This industry brought about a Victorian ecological disaster that presaged the greater destruction of tropical rain forests occurring today.

REVIEW ARTICLE

As the field of world history grew in the 1990s, so did a comparable effort by American historians to “internationalize” the study of U.S. history. Four new books show the considerable strides that have been made in showing how the global context of American events not only adds to U.S. history but also changes some of the ways in which professors and students see the United States and its role in the world. World historians too can learn from and contribute to this intellectual trend.